We all know that, to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. The government says we need nuclear power to do this. Our new film explains why nuclear power can’t stop climate change – and lays down a better, cheaper, more convenient solution:

Right-click on these links and select 'Save link as...' to download the film as a Quicktime (30MB) or Windows Media (27MB) file.

Convinced? Find out what you can do to make sure the UK gets a genuinely clean and efficient energy system.

Not convinced yet? Read on.

The single biggest use of fossil fuels in the UK isn't for electricity or for transport, but for creating heat to warm our buildings and power our industrial processes. So any solution to climate change needs to contribute to heating, as well as to electricity generation.

Nuclear power contributes almost nothing to our enormous heating requirements. In fact it contributes less than four per cent to our overall energy needs. And building new nuclear power stations (as the government wants to do) won't increase that share.

So what is the solution? Well, in the same amount of time and for less money, we could implement an energy system that will do far more to stop climate change and ensure energy security than nuclear power: a combination of renewable energy, efficiency, and combined heat and power:

Renewable energy Our windswept island has more than enough wind, wave and tidal power potential to meet all of our energy needs many times over. Between them, wind, wave and tidal power could deliver more than twice as much electricity than the proposed new fleet of nuclear reactors in the same timeframe - and the renewable energy sources would come online more quickly, require no fuel and won’t have the danger or cost of the nuclear waste.

Efficiency "Energy efficiency isn't just a free lunch," said Amory Lovins, "it's a lunch you are paid to eat." Because of inefficient buildings and appliances, every year we throw away more than eight times the amount of energy supplied by all of the UK's nuclear power stations combined. Simple efficiency measures can reduce our need for both heat and power, lowering our dependency on gas imports far more than nuclear power ever could, while saving consumers £12 billion every year. Implementing these measures would save more money that it costs.

Combined heat and power (CHP) But most of the waste in our electricity system happens before it even reaches us. Our power stations throw away two-thirds of the energy they generate – they throw out enough "waste" heat to keep every building in the UK nice and warm, and to provide the hot water too. If power stations are sited near towns and cities or on industrial sites, then this heat can be captured and used in the nearby homes or on the factory site.

These combined heat and power (CHP) plants provide both heat and power, only take a few years to build and just a relatively small number of the largest scale units can provide the same electricity as the proposed new nuclear power plants.

We've sent DVDs of The Convenient Solution to every MP - ask your MP to watch it, and find out what else you can do to spread the word about the real solution to climate change.

Because CHP can run efficiently off all sorts of fuels, they’re crucial for our transition away from fossil fuels towards clean fuels like biomass. This is where the beer bit comes in. While the government dithers, companies like Manchester’s Royal Brewery (home of Fosters) are taking the initiative by installing CHP to generate their own heat and electricity. The brewery is upgrading its CHP plant, so that it can be fuelled entirely by biomass, including the spent grain used in the brewing process.

The future The way we generate energy right now is downright crazy – we’re using inefficient and archaic technologies that mean we end up throwing away far more energy that we actually use. The government’s energy consultation is a chance to introduce a rational, clean and efficient energy system that will stop climate change and ensure energy security. But instead of taking the opportunity, the government seems to want to push us into an even more irrational and archaic system that will do almost nothing to stop climate change or ensure energy security: nuclear power.

Getting a genuinely clean and efficient energy system in the UK has never been more important. We don't have time to make mistakes. Our volunteers have been visiting MPs across the country for months to get the word out but now we need your help to pile on the pressure before the energy consultation closes.

Sorry if this sounds blunt, Gandalf, but have you watched either of the films?

We are proposing alternatives - a mixture of renewables, CHP, and energy efficiency. Other European countries are already producing far more electricity from renewables than we are; they're also using CHP. I don't think anyone's saying wind power can generate all of our electricity but as Tracy points out about, it could contribute up to a quarter by 2025.

CHP is all about using heat that is currently lost in fossil-fuelled power stations, so the power plants can be small and fit alongside homes and offices. No one is talking about placing coal-fired or nuclear power stations in urban areas - mainly because we don't want to see anymore built full stop.

You're right that energy efficiency is crucial too - if we use less energy, we won't need to generate so much. That's why we've started our work on light bulbs which is just the beginning of a wider energy efficiency campaign that will roll out over the coming weeks and months.

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 30 August 2007 at 2:35pm

Thanks for the question, gorkitek. As you can imagine there are a huge range of variables to be considered when calculating EROI figures (which measure the amount energy delivered against how much it costs). Basically, the larger the turbine (both in blade size and power rating) the greater the EROI - the most recent wind farms are far more efficient, but the cost of manufacture varies widely around the world, making it hard to compare like with like. In all cases the production process itself has a greater influence upon the magnitude of input energy than site conditions or transportation.

One of the best recent studies was undertaken by Dr Cutler Cleveland of Boston University in 2006. He compiled a range of EROI studies on turbines produced between 1990 and 2003. Interestingly the REOI of modern turbines compares very favourably with other forms of power generation, comfortably beating coal, and nuclear, and running hydropower a fairly close second.

More information is available in downloadable PDF format from the reports section of http://www.yes2wind.com. Try the Gobal Wind Energy Output report for starters.

Hope this helps.

By jossc - 31 August 2007 at 2:40pm

Hi Gandalf

Jamie's not in the office today so I'm replying on his behalf. We have loads of facts and figures on renewables here, as well as a list of sources and references we use.

The data on European countries comes from The European Commission. Halfway down this page there's a table showing the share of renewable energies in primary energy consumption of EU countries in 2005 - as you'll see, only Belgium, Cyprus and Malta are worse than the UK.

On CHP, we're talking about two kinds of plants: industrial and urban. On industrial sites where huge quantities of heat are needed, CHP plants can be similarly big. For example, the Immingham CHP plant, supplying two refineries in Humberside with heat, steam and power, is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as the UK's flagship nuclear power station, Sizewell B (reference). In fact, on a relatively small number of industrial sites in the UK, there's enough CHP potential to provide the same electricity generating capacity as the whole of the proposed new generation of nuclear reactors combined.

On urban CHP (where smaller power plants are located near villages, towns and cities), we are talking about a larger number of smaller plants - our case studies on Southampton or Woking might be of interest if you'd like to know more about how these work.

If we combine the potential for CHP on industrial sites and in communities then, according to government figures, we could generate more than double the expected output of electricity from the proposed nuclear programme - in the same time frame, for less money and without the legacy of nuclear waste.

You ask what the CHP plants will be powered by. The answer is - pretty much anything, which is why CHP is crucial for our transition away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable energy sources. So, in the short term, some CHP plants may still use fossil fuels - but, because it's the most efficient way possible to use these fuels, it cuts emissions and reduces fuel dependency immediately.

Moreover, CHP can use diverse fuels in the same boilers. This means that, as more greener fuels like biomass (straw bales, for example, or waste wood pellets or certain specially grown crops) become available, they can be used in the CHP plants instead - with no need to refit the equipment, but with an immediate reduction in CO2 emissions and with the knowledge that these precious green fuels are also being used in the most efficient way possible.

You ask how much heat can be generated from these. Well, there's enough heat wasted by our power stations at the moment to heat every building in the UK, as well as all of the hot water we need for domestic and business purposes. CHP plants can achieve up to 95% efficiency (eg Avedore in Denmark), so CHP is more than capable of heating whole communities.

Sorry for my wordiness - I do appreciate your point that people need facts and figures to back up our points - sometimes it's just hard to fit everything in concisely! There are links at the bottom of the blog post to more info on CHP, renewables, efficiency, case studies etc, and from there you'd find links to a dense page of facts, figures, references and sources.

Cheers for your interest,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 4 September 2007 at 3:03pm

By the way, Gandalf, I don't know if you've seen our film specifically on CHP / decentralised energy yet. It's a bit longer than A Convenient Solution but well worth it if you're interested in seeing how CHP plants are working in various projects in the UK and around the world. You can watch it here.

By bex - 4 September 2007 at 3:08pm

And thanks for your suggestions - point taken about the layout of the content.

We try to take into account the different needs people have from the website; some people (I think) have a passing interest and may only want a brief overview of the subject - an enormously long page might put them off. Others, like yourself, want the full shebang. At least that was my assumption when creating the pages, so the idea was to give a brief introduction with the ability to drill down to further info. Maybe my assumption's wrong though and people do want more info all in one place (feel free to jump in here, anyone!).

I'll have a think about how to make it more usable.

(A bit of a tangent but another debate we often have here that influences our page layout is the extent to which Greenpeace's role is "to teach and tell", as you put it, and the extent to which it is to inspire people to take action. Usually, our main aim is to inspire action and there's a strand of thinking that says too much information can overwhelm and paralyse, and generate a feeling of helplessness. But personally, I think the issue of energy is a bit different - we're facing a massive choice and it takes a relatively detailed grasp of electricity and heat generation and consumption to get an understanding of why nuclear can't stop climate change and how the solution we're proposing can. So the more info the better on this one, maybe.)

Cheers also for the links - interesting stuff (I didn't know about the Pimlico scheme).

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 5 September 2007 at 5:23pm

I've had to go to our CHP gurus to get the in-depth answer for you, and unfortunately they're up to their eyes with organising regional screenings of the film (Manchester tonight, if you're in that neck of the woods and fancy a discussion).

And you're right that some energy gets lost in transmission - although far, far more is wasted through inefficient generation. Of 100 units of energy within fossil fuels, 3.5 units are lost through transmission and distribution. A whopping 61.5 are lost through inefficient generation and wastage at the power plant. This pic shows it quite nicely.

The beauty of CHP is that it eliminates most of both of these wastages. Because it captures and uses the "wasted" heat, it slashes the wastage at the point of generation. And because, with CHP, energy is generated close to where it's used, the losses from transmission are also reduced.

This allows CHP plants to reach incredibly high efficiency levels - like 95 per cent compared to the average UK non-CHP plant, which is only 38 per cent efficient.

On green being expensive - not compared to nuclear. On a relatively small number of industrial sites in the UK, there's enough CHP potential to provide the same electricity generating capacity as the whole of the proposed new generation of nuclear reactors combined. They'd take only a few years to build, would provide heat as well as electricity and, based on the reported investment at Immingham CHP plant, would cost a fraction of the price.

Thanks,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:29pm

Dolly, sorry for the delay!

OK, speaking to our experts, generating heat close to communities is exactly the same principle as having a boiler in your home - and the technology to ensure utmost safety around CHP plants already exists.

But I think your question was more about electro-magnetic fields? This isn't my area of expertise at all, so I'll steal from my colleague Jamie's reply to another comment:

According to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website, there's currently no scientific evidence to link electromagnetic fields and the symptoms attributed to electrosensitivity. Of the 37 studies undertaken on the subject, only seven have shown any measurable effects and there are question marks over those. Compare this to the colossal amount of scientific evidence pointing to the reality of climate change, and I don't think there's any competition.

He also has some interesting things to say about Alasdair Philips and his range of products designed to protect the unwary from rampaging electromagnetic fields.

Hope that helps (a bit!),

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:38pm

I just wanted to say thanks for your extremely eloquent comment. I've been trying to sum it up as well as that for quite a while...

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:49pm

Hi Jenny,

thanks for the questions. I think the only truthful answer would be that no one really knows - I'm not aware of any published studies in this area, although there may well be some in progress.

What I think we can say is that the greatest threat to our ocean ecosytems comes from the warming of the oceans, causing mass migrations, coral bleaching, toxic plankton blooms and the like. I've not heard of there being any great pollution threat from turbines at sea - in fact these structures are likely to have a beneficial effect, acting as artificial reefs which shellfish and other invertebrates can colonise. Another positive effect of big offshore wind farms like the London Array is that they will inevitably restrict the amount of fishing in the area as the vast nets used by modern trawlers will get entagled - and any reduction in fishing effort has got to be good news for sealife!

all the best,
Joss

By jossc - 31 October 2007 at 1:28pm

Hi Cemma

You said: A nuclear power station would fit on a football pitch - to grow crops to produce the same amount of energy would take up the whole of the highlands of Scotland - to build wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy would line the coastline from Lands End to Dover.

Um, The London Array wind farm will soon generate the equivalent of the electricity needs for 750,000 homes. In some more recently conceived projects, single wind farms would have about the same output as a typical nuclear power station.

With the crops, I assume you’re talking about biomass for combined heat and power (CHP) plants? CHP can run on a range of fuels – many of them from industrial and domestic waste. (On the size of CHP plants by the way, Immingham CHP in Humberside is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as Sizewell B).

But I think you’re missing the point of the film – we wouldn’t be replacing like with like. Nuclear power belongs to the old, inefficient, unflexible, centralised energy model of large, remote power stations, where 2/3 of all energy is wasted. We’re calling for a decentralised energy system in with smaller plants located close to where electricity is used, so waste heat can be captured.

You said: An air hostess receives more radiation than a nuclear power worker

Accidents excepted, workers inside nuclear plants probably are well protected from radiation. But the people and ecosystems near plants clearly aren’t. Take Sellafield, which has routinely chucked radioactive liquids and gases into the Irish Sea since 1953. In the nearby area, childhood leukaemia incidence is up to 14 times higher than the rest of Britain. (Officially, the cause is unknown but radiation is the only known environmental cause of leukaemia.) The government's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee estimates that this and future generations can expect 200 cancer deaths worldwide for each year that Sellafield discharges nuclear waste into the sea and air. And the Irish Sea is now the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world - hence we have radioactive salmon and sea food). The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment is choc-full of reports on this subject.

You said: Every new nuclear power station is strong enough to withhold a 9/11 type terrorist attack.

The (pro-nuclear) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said: “Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time. If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact.'' There’s loads more in our nuclear power and terrorism briefing (pdf).

In terms of the new reactors (EPRs, which are proposed for the UK), a confidential leaked document from Electricite de France (EdF, who build reactors) contradicts you too. After 9/11, EdF was asked to prove that its reactors could withstand aircraft attack. Apparently the only way they could do it was to base their calculations on a number of ridiculous assumptions: 1) that the impact of a 250 tonne commercial jet aircraft would be the same as the impact of a 2-5 tonne military aircraft 2) that terrorists would have insufficient skills to pilot an aircraft directly into a nuclear power station and 3) that up to 100 tonnes of aviation fuel from a commercial aircraft would burn up within two minutes. Lots more in this Assessment of the Operational Risks and Hazards of the EPR when Subject to Aircraft Attack.

You said: Ninety per cent of the world's radiation is in the atmosphere - 9.9% comes from medical activities - 0.003% comes from nuclear power stations.

Again, I don’t have time to check your figures but I assume you realise they’re beside the point? The problem isn’t with low level background radiation in the atmosphere; it’s with high concentrations of radioactive materials flooding into oceans, land, ecosystems, water tables, farms, food chain and populated areas (not to mention all the species we share the planet with). Just in terms of human health, you can find out more about the impacts of radiation in our report on the consequences on human health from the Chernobyl catastrophe.

You said: There are 20 nuclear power stations on the French coast south of Calais. So if they were hit we would be snookered anyway!

Therefore we should build more plants here so future generations keep facing the threat?

You said: 30 new nuclear power stations in the UK would provide nearly all of our electricity. 30 new nuclear power stations in the UK would reduce our CO2 emissions by 40%

Again, I’m not going to check your figures because the argument is academic. How would it be possible to build 30 reactors in the UK? Where would you site them? Our (pro-nuclear) government only wants to build 10 (to replace those that are reaching the end of their ability to operate safely). Even the nuclear industry isn’t proposing building 30 – they know there’s no way you could find 30 sites in the UK suited to building a nuclear power plant (even the ones we have are precariously at risk of flooding from climate change). And what would you do with the waste? We already have half a million tonnes that the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management doesn’t know what to do with. (Their chair admits: "clearly our recommendations do not solve the problem") And where would you find the hundreds of billions of pounds for them?

You said: Total affordable UK renewable capacity (<7p/kWh) is only 10% of total energy demand.

In terms of electricity supply, even the government’s own figures show that a mixture of tidal, wave and wind could provide more than double what nuclear can in the same time frame – and to do so would be economic and practicable (more than a quarter of today's electricity consumption from wind power by 2025, and 12.5 per cent from wave and tidal).

In terms of energy, by which I assume you mean heat and electricity, nuclear power does almost nothing to contribute to our heating needs (the biggest use of fossil fuels in the UK). CHP on the other hand can do a huge amount by capturing waste heat at the source, as the name suggests. (That’s without mentioning the energy savings we can make through efficiency: every year we throw away more than eight times the amount of energy supplied by all of the UK's nuclear power stations combined.)

You said: Every nuclear power station in the West has a specially designed concrete containment shield. These have never failed. Russian reactors never had this. Nobody has died in the Western nuclear power program, compared to tens of thousands in coal mines, gas pipeline explosions hydro accidents etc. New nuclear power stations can be built of a 'passively safe' modular design.

You might want to look at the Windscale disaster here in the UK for starters: “Figures for non-fatal cancers vary from none to 248 and for fatal cancers between 10 and 100. One estimate [from epidemiologist John Urquhart, was the first to really assess the impact of the polonium-210 release from the fire] put the figure as high as 1,000.”

Over the past few years, there have been reactor safety problems in the UK (here, here, here, here and here, say) Finland (over 1000 breaches of safety rules just 18 months into construction), Sweden and Japan – just for starters. In fact, there’s been a nuclear accident or radioactive release for every day of the year (pdf).

You said: So off this are we happy that nuclear power would actually help our country?

Ummm... no. Sorry :)

You said: I fail to see why it is any business of a bunch of BoBo hippies at the greenpeace office how their coffee grinders and bagel toasters get powered.

I fail to see why it’s any business of a few people after short-term profit to degrade or destroy the world’s oceans, forests and atmosphere (ie “the global commons”) and many of the species dependent on them through climate change and radioactive contamination. But hey, I’m just a BoBo hippy ;)

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 2 November 2007 at 12:44pm

Firstly, I absolutely agree that energy solutions should be appropriate to the task they're fulfilling, and that we need diversity of sources.

Certain industries have spent a good deal of effort putting about the myth that CHP / renewables aren't base-load, and can't be reliable. In fact, I'd argue that renewables and CHP (and efficiency) are more reliable than nukes / coal, because they're scalable to demand and application, and they fit perfectly into a flexible, decentralised model.

Diversity still requires choices, and experience shows that you can't mix nuclear and renewables/CHP effectively: nuclear sucks investment away from renewables/CHP; it relies on a static, centralised model and as opposed to a decentralised model; and, as this report (pdf) points out, "nuclear and renewables may both be able to run on the grid as long as both are making relatively small overall contributions, but both cannot expand beyond a certain point without there being operational conflicts."

CHP can be base-load. It can be scaled up to huge sizes (Immingham CHP plant is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as Sizewell B). Yes, output depends on heat demand, but industrial CHP plants like Immingham are basically base-load plants; there's a constant demand for heat/steam so there's a constant electrical output to act as base-load supply.

For smaller CHP plants, output depends on heat demand, but if it's properly sited (eg near a commercial/industrial site that requires heat/cooling), CHP can have a consistent, constant electrical output that can be pumped into the grid.

To answer the example you mention, a city like London has a high enough heat and build density to make CHP financially, as well as environmentally, attractive.

Renewables can also be base-load; solar thermal and geothermal for example, have identical variability to coal-fired power stations. Linked wind farms can also result in reliable power (source).

There's interesting stuff on the base-load fallacy here (pdf), bits of which I've pilfered for this comment :-) There's also this interesting article on how Germany can be powered - reliably - using distributed power based on 100% renewables, and biogas CHP. And this (older) article looks in-depth at renewables and the baseload question.

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 4 January 2008 at 7:27pm

Hey Chris

Re-reading our Southampton case study, I realise I didn't phrase it too well - I've now amended it to make it clear that the £7 million figure you quote is for the whole Southampton district heating network, not just the hospital. (The network provides heating, cooling and electricity to over a thousand residential properties, several large office buildings, a health clinic, a university, a large shopping centre, a supermarket, several hotels, BBC television studios, one of Europe's largest shopping complexes, a swimming and diving complex, as well as the hospital, among other buildings).

I'll try to dig up some figures on costs of decentralised energy for London but, in the meantime, you might be interested in our report, Powering London into the 21st Century (pdf), on decentralised energy in London.

There are all sorts of goodies (animations, videos, slideshows explaining everything from wave power to biogas) if you click around and drill down far enough.

It's also shows how the whole decentralised energy system fits together (eg the role of CHP and how heat and cooling are distributed, for example) a lot more clearly and intuitively than my writing, hopefully.

(Getting EfficienCity ready for launch is also my excuse for not having answered the last few comments yet - sorry. Soon.).

Sorry for the length of this but I'm trying to respond to all your comments across the site in one go, as they all repeat the same myths.

I’ll answer your points on air pollution below but first off, I have to point out that you haven’t provided a credible alternative to our energy solution.

We’ve clearly explained how renewables + efficiency + CHP can lead us to a low emissions energy system, using CHP as a transition to 100 per cent renewables, providing heat and electricity for the whole of the UK. Initially CHP would be partly fossil fuelled and it would then go on to use zero carbon fuels like biogas. Over time more, renewable heat like solar and geothermal can also be introduced into the district heating networks – as they have done in the 100% renewable district in the city of Malmö, Sweden.

As I’ve said before, a replacement programme of ten nuclear reactors in the UK that the government's endorsed will only meet about 3.6% of our total energy needs - because they won’t provide heat. Around half our energy need is for heat (mainly gas based), while the next biggest demand is for transport (mainly oil based). Electricity generation is the smallest portion, and any new nuclear would be a small portion of that, making its role in tackling climate change / ensuring energy security almost irrelevant.

That's why the nuclear plan causes much more air pollution overall, for the total system; it can't possibly displace the majority of fossil fuel use, and leaves us running on the same kind of wasteful and polluting coal plants we have today. (Don't forget, the same ministers and companies that want to build new nuclear plants are also proposing the horde of new dirty coal plants across Britain – the most polluting power plants of all.)

According to our report, a UK energy scenario with high levels of decentralised energy using CHP and big renewables leads to less fuel burn over all than the government and industry plan of a centralized scenario with ambitious nuclear build. Less fuel use means less overall air pollution.

Your answer to that is that you want nuclear combined heat and power. No one in the nuclear industry or government is proposing that anyway – they wouldn’t dare propose to put them near to densely populated areas. But even if they did, you still haven’t explained how you’ll get rid of fossil fuels.

Are you suggesting we’ll be able to displace all our fossil fuelled power plants and all our individual boilers with nuclear CHP? Do you have an estimate for how many nuclear plants you’d need to do that? (In China, with the most ambitious nuclear programme in the world, they will still only generate a couple of percent of their electricity from nuclear when and if they built all 30-40 reactors that have been mooted there. Most of the rest of their electricity will still be coming from coal.)

How can the UK possibly get enough nuclear power to displace all our fossil fuel needs? Specifically, how are you going to find the enormous funds required to build small nuclear power stations near every town and city (the smaller ones you suggest, which won’t benefit from the economies of scale)? Where will you find the sites fit to host N nuclear plants? How will you persuade local residents across the UK to accept nuclear power and/or nuclear waste sites in the outskirts of their towns and cities? If you don’t want the nuclear plants to be close to urban centres, how will you fund the phenomenal costs of piping heat from, say, Sizewell to London? How will you find the nuclear engineers to build all the plants (there’s already a huge skills shortage)?

How will you persuade the government that the building of your nuclear plants won’t run massively over time and over budget like every other nuclear construction project (the average nuclear power station is finished four years late and 300 per cent over budget)? How will you transport all the radioactive wastes between the sites without putting the public at an unacceptable risk? How will you protect every plant and transport route from contamination / accident / terrorist attack? How do you propose to make nuclear power a globally applicable solution (at the moment, some countries, like Iran, are being told they aren’t allowed to have it)? For nuclear power to realistically meet our future global electricity demands, 2000 - 2500 reactors will need to be constructed between now and 2075 - an impossible task. How will you guarantee the weapons grade plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands? How do you plan to get rid of the significant fossil fuel use in the nuclear lifecycle (mining, transport, energy use around facilities, waste storage)?

And, if you agree that nuclear CHP will never fill the gap alone and you want renewables in the mix, how do you envisage stopping nuclear from undermining renewables as global experience and technical grid limitations both show it does (nuclear and renewables may both be able to run on the grid as long as both are making relatively small overall contributions, but both can't expand beyond a certain point without there being operational conflicts)? The nuclear industry itself says there is a conflict between nuclear and renewables and has lobbied to get the European renewable energy target weakened. Vincent De Rivaz, the CEO of EDF Energy stated at the Adam Smith Institute in March that if the UK actually started to make significant progress in meeting its Renewables Obligations, the economic viability of the new generation of nuclear power plants would be undermined and nuclear would be marginalised.

The case for decentralised energy based on renewables, CHP and efficiency has already been made and proven – in countless reports and in other countries. Why would you want to use an outdated technology that is more expensive and more dangerous?

I’m guessing you’re going to say because of particulates/air pollution (and you are right that air pollution is a big concern and a killer, especially in places like China). But, for all the reasons above, nuclear allows continued and even increased air pollution because of its undermining effect on energy efficiency measures – the nuclear option is more likely to lead to more air pollution than a system of decentralised energy based on gas / biomass / biogas CHP. And going nuclear can’t lead us to a 100% renewables scenario. Decentralised energy can. All the new nuclear in China is barely going to touch the air pollution problems there.

On your comments about CHP and particulates, larger CHP falls under IPPC requirements, and these control emissions to air. (And, as from the start of this year, some large CHP plants are covered by Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), specifically targetting NOx SOx and particulates.)

Before a CHP plant can be built, modified or continue to be operated, emissions to air are mapped, taking into account all existing sources of emission (not just those of the new/existing plant – let’s not forget that cars and lorries are a major source of air pollution too) to ensure local air quality standards are met. If the model shows that the emissions "on the ground" get near to breaching the local air quality standards then the plant will not be built or, if it exists, allowed to continue to operate unless its output is restricted/other measures put in place.

Then there’s the fact that a decent sized gas-fired CHP plant will displace many hundreds or thousands of individual gas-fired boilers. Therefore, it can actually improve local air quality, because:

- a large heat plant will be sized more closely to actual heat loads than individual boilers, which are typically oversized to meet peak demand load. (A district heat plant overcomes this problem by having in-line boilers that are switched on or off progressively as demand for heat fluctuates throughout the day or the year.)

- a large CHP plant will burn gas more efficiently than the combination of all those numerous small boilers and the power plants providing the equivalent heat and electricity.

- it’s cost effective and quick to add emissions cleaning equipment to large plant, or to switch it to cleaner fuels as they become available, but not with many small ones like boilers.

- the maintenance of large plants will be more effectively managed than individual boilers, impacting on the efficiency and cleanness of gas burn.

I hope that answers all of your points. And sorry for the delay. As you can imagine, we don’t have the resources to post dozens of comments on the same point – unlike some well funded industries… ;-)

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 15 May 2008 at 12:05pm

Hi again ColinG

Just realised I haven't responded directly on nuclear waste and your assertion that there's no valid environmental case for avoiding nuclear power.

Not only do reactor operations present their own hazards and exposure pathways - like neutron shine and radioactive discharges in the biosphere - there are other risks which contribute to the overall environmental impact of nuclear power and nuclear activities. Waste is created at every stage of the process - from mining, uranium conversion and enrichment, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, storage and disposal.

And there's still no safe solution to disposing of the estimated half a million tones of legacy radioactive waste created in the UK.

Despite government and industry claims, there is no solution to this intractable problem – with no operating waste disposal site anywhere in the world – and there's huge uncertainty over the scientific and technical integrity of the agreed option such as geological disposal. Whilst deep disposal is based on a multi-barrier approach, it is recognised by NIREX that, in time, the integrity of these barriers will be compromised and radioactive contamination will inevitably return to the surface environment. In other words, it's clear that 'disposing' of radioactive waste in a deep 'repository' accepts by default the outdated premise of eventual dispersal and dilution into the environment - rather like dumping industrial waste into a river - posing a persistent, irreversible threat to future generations.

And despite nuclear industry claims that these new reactors would "only" increase the UK's current waste volume by 10%, what they don't say is that this will include a 300% increase of the most long-lived and highly radioactive waste. Without a solution to dealing with legacy waste, to build more reactors and add the stockpile raises huge environmental, social, and ethical questions which makes such a proposal unacceptable.

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 15 May 2008 at 12:16pm

Hi Colin,

A lot of experts would disagree with you that "The technical solution to the safe disposal of nuclear waste has been known for a long time" - including some from CoRWM (the body tasked by the government with finding a solution to dealing with the UK's existing radioactive waste, whose report you link to).

Pete Wilkinson, member the first Committee on Radioactive Waste Management:

"There is no 'solution' to the management of radioactive waste, be it 'legacy waste' or that derived from the operation of a new generation of nuclear power plants. That Government has assumed the recommendation from the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management represents such a 'solution' is wrong and deliberately mendacious."

Prof Andy Blowers, also a member of CoRWM:

"The unresolved technical and ethical concerns related to managing radioactive wastes safely provide both a necessary and sufficient condition for rejecting the case for nuclear new build."

and

"Nuclear new build should not proceed until there is an acceptable solution for the permanent management of long-lived solid nuclear waste."

"There are real concerns that infants and children living near nuclear facilities may be subject to greater cancer and leukaemia risk."

and

"Since current radiation risk standards are subject to large levels of fundamental scientific uncertainty, and may underestimate risk to public health, it would be unwise to subject critical groups and the general public to further radiological insult through new nuclear build in the UK."

Here, have a poll to cheer yourself up: I just stumbled across the Ipsos Mori 2008 poll on climate change today and the findings are interesting - it looks like attitudes are changing faster than it sometimes seems (to me).

77 per cent of people are very or fairly concerned about climate change, 68 per cent want the government to do more, and 59 per cent want the UK to invest in renewables, even if it costs more.

When it comes to individual action, 86 per cent say we should be taking personal action (4 per cent don't know). But, interestingly, 77 per cent agree with the statement 'People are concerned but at the end of the day they're not prepared to make big sacrifices for the environment'.

So to me, the poll suggests almost everybody thinks they should be taking personal action (to some degree or another), but assumes nobody else will do the same.

Of course there's still the question of how substantial that personal action is but, once that first mental leap has been taken...

Optimistically,

Bex
gpuk

By bex - 23 July 2008 at 5:40pm

Sorry if this sounds blunt, Gandalf, but have you watched either of the films? We are proposing alternatives - a mixture of renewables, CHP, and energy efficiency. Other European countries are already producing far more electricity from renewables than we are; they're also using CHP. I don't think anyone's saying wind power can generate all of our electricity but as Tracy points out about, it could contribute up to a quarter by 2025. CHP is all about using heat that is currently lost in fossil-fuelled power stations, so the power plants can be small and fit alongside homes and offices. No one is talking about placing coal-fired or nuclear power stations in urban areas - mainly because we don't want to see anymore built full stop. You're right that energy efficiency is crucial too - if we use less energy, we won't need to generate so much. That's why we've started our work on light bulbs which is just the beginning of a wider energy efficiency campaign that will roll out over the coming weeks and months. web editor gpuk

By jamie - 30 August 2007 at 2:35pm

Thanks for the question, gorkitek. As you can imagine there are a huge range of variables to be considered when calculating EROI figures (which measure the amount energy delivered against how much it costs). Basically, the larger the turbine (both in blade size and power rating) the greater the EROI - the most recent wind farms are far more efficient, but the cost of manufacture varies widely around the world, making it hard to compare like with like. In all cases the production process itself has a greater influence upon the magnitude of input energy than site conditions or transportation. One of the best recent studies was undertaken by Dr Cutler Cleveland of Boston University in 2006. He compiled a range of EROI studies on turbines produced between 1990 and 2003. Interestingly the REOI of modern turbines compares very favourably with other forms of power generation, comfortably beating coal, and nuclear, and running hydropower a fairly close second. More information is available in downloadable PDF format from the reports section of http://www.yes2wind.com. Try the Gobal Wind Energy Output report for starters. Hope this helps.

By jossc - 31 August 2007 at 2:40pm

Hi Gandalf Jamie's not in the office today so I'm replying on his behalf. We have loads of facts and figures on renewables here, as well as a list of sources and references we use. The data on European countries comes from The European Commission. Halfway down this page there's a table showing the share of renewable energies in primary energy consumption of EU countries in 2005 - as you'll see, only Belgium, Cyprus and Malta are worse than the UK. On CHP, we're talking about two kinds of plants: industrial and urban. On industrial sites where huge quantities of heat are needed, CHP plants can be similarly big. For example, the Immingham CHP plant, supplying two refineries in Humberside with heat, steam and power, is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as the UK's flagship nuclear power station, Sizewell B (reference). In fact, on a relatively small number of industrial sites in the UK, there's enough CHP potential to provide the same electricity generating capacity as the whole of the proposed new generation of nuclear reactors combined. On urban CHP (where smaller power plants are located near villages, towns and cities), we are talking about a larger number of smaller plants - our case studies on Southampton or Woking might be of interest if you'd like to know more about how these work. If we combine the potential for CHP on industrial sites and in communities then, according to government figures, we could generate more than double the expected output of electricity from the proposed nuclear programme - in the same time frame, for less money and without the legacy of nuclear waste. You ask what the CHP plants will be powered by. The answer is - pretty much anything, which is why CHP is crucial for our transition away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable energy sources. So, in the short term, some CHP plants may still use fossil fuels - but, because it's the most efficient way possible to use these fuels, it cuts emissions and reduces fuel dependency immediately. Moreover, CHP can use diverse fuels in the same boilers. This means that, as more greener fuels like biomass (straw bales, for example, or waste wood pellets or certain specially grown crops) become available, they can be used in the CHP plants instead - with no need to refit the equipment, but with an immediate reduction in CO2 emissions and with the knowledge that these precious green fuels are also being used in the most efficient way possible. You ask how much heat can be generated from these. Well, there's enough heat wasted by our power stations at the moment to heat every building in the UK, as well as all of the hot water we need for domestic and business purposes. CHP plants can achieve up to 95% efficiency (eg Avedore in Denmark), so CHP is more than capable of heating whole communities. Sorry for my wordiness - I do appreciate your point that people need facts and figures to back up our points - sometimes it's just hard to fit everything in concisely! There are links at the bottom of the blog post to more info on CHP, renewables, efficiency, case studies etc, and from there you'd find links to a dense page of facts, figures, references and sources. Cheers for your interest, Bex gpuk

By bex - 4 September 2007 at 3:03pm

By the way, Gandalf, I don't know if you've seen our film specifically on CHP / decentralised energy yet. It's a bit longer than A Convenient Solution but well worth it if you're interested in seeing how CHP plants are working in various projects in the UK and around the world. You can watch it here.

By bex - 4 September 2007 at 3:08pm

And thanks for your suggestions - point taken about the layout of the content. We try to take into account the different needs people have from the website; some people (I think) have a passing interest and may only want a brief overview of the subject - an enormously long page might put them off. Others, like yourself, want the full shebang. At least that was my assumption when creating the pages, so the idea was to give a brief introduction with the ability to drill down to further info. Maybe my assumption's wrong though and people do want more info all in one place (feel free to jump in here, anyone!). I'll have a think about how to make it more usable. (A bit of a tangent but another debate we often have here that influences our page layout is the extent to which Greenpeace's role is "to teach and tell", as you put it, and the extent to which it is to inspire people to take action. Usually, our main aim is to inspire action and there's a strand of thinking that says too much information can overwhelm and paralyse, and generate a feeling of helplessness. But personally, I think the issue of energy is a bit different - we're facing a massive choice and it takes a relatively detailed grasp of electricity and heat generation and consumption to get an understanding of why nuclear can't stop climate change and how the solution we're proposing can. So the more info the better on this one, maybe.) Cheers also for the links - interesting stuff (I didn't know about the Pimlico scheme). Bex gpuk

By bex - 5 September 2007 at 5:23pm

I've had to go to our CHP gurus to get the in-depth answer for you, and unfortunately they're up to their eyes with organising regional screenings of the film (Manchester tonight, if you're in that neck of the woods and fancy a discussion). I'll get back to you once I've cornered one of them! Bex gpuk

By bex - 27 September 2007 at 11:55am

(Answering on Tracy's behalf). Yep, it's true, nothing's 100 per cent efficient - although some things get pretty close! Avedore CHP plant in Denmark reaches around 95 per cent efficiency. And you're right that some energy gets lost in transmission - although far, far more is wasted through inefficient generation. Of 100 units of energy within fossil fuels, 3.5 units are lost through transmission and distribution. A whopping 61.5 are lost through inefficient generation and wastage at the power plant. This pic shows it quite nicely. The beauty of CHP is that it eliminates most of both of these wastages. Because it captures and uses the "wasted" heat, it slashes the wastage at the point of generation. And because, with CHP, energy is generated close to where it's used, the losses from transmission are also reduced. This allows CHP plants to reach incredibly high efficiency levels - like 95 per cent compared to the average UK non-CHP plant, which is only 38 per cent efficient. On green being expensive - not compared to nuclear. On a relatively small number of industrial sites in the UK, there's enough CHP potential to provide the same electricity generating capacity as the whole of the proposed new generation of nuclear reactors combined. They'd take only a few years to build, would provide heat as well as electricity and, based on the reported investment at Immingham CHP plant, would cost a fraction of the price. Thanks, Bex gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:29pm

Dolly, sorry for the delay! OK, speaking to our experts, generating heat close to communities is exactly the same principle as having a boiler in your home - and the technology to ensure utmost safety around CHP plants already exists. But I think your question was more about electro-magnetic fields? This isn't my area of expertise at all, so I'll steal from my colleague Jamie's reply to another comment: According to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website, there's currently no scientific evidence to link electromagnetic fields and the symptoms attributed to electrosensitivity. Of the 37 studies undertaken on the subject, only seven have shown any measurable effects and there are question marks over those. Compare this to the colossal amount of scientific evidence pointing to the reality of climate change, and I don't think there's any competition. He also has some interesting things to say about Alasdair Philips and his range of products designed to protect the unwary from rampaging electromagnetic fields. Hope that helps (a bit!), Bex gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:38pm

I just wanted to say thanks for your extremely eloquent comment. I've been trying to sum it up as well as that for quite a while... Bex gpuk

By bex - 4 October 2007 at 4:49pm

Hi Jenny, thanks for the questions. I think the only truthful answer would be that no one really knows - I'm not aware of any published studies in this area, although there may well be some in progress. What I think we can say is that the greatest threat to our ocean ecosytems comes from the warming of the oceans, causing mass migrations, coral bleaching, toxic plankton blooms and the like. I've not heard of there being any great pollution threat from turbines at sea - in fact these structures are likely to have a beneficial effect, acting as artificial reefs which shellfish and other invertebrates can colonise. Another positive effect of big offshore wind farms like the London Array is that they will inevitably restrict the amount of fishing in the area as the vast nets used by modern trawlers will get entagled - and any reduction in fishing effort has got to be good news for sealife! all the best, Joss

By jossc - 31 October 2007 at 1:28pm

Hi Cemma You said: A nuclear power station would fit on a football pitch - to grow crops to produce the same amount of energy would take up the whole of the highlands of Scotland - to build wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy would line the coastline from Lands End to Dover. Um, The London Array wind farm will soon generate the equivalent of the electricity needs for 750,000 homes. In some more recently conceived projects, single wind farms would have about the same output as a typical nuclear power station. With the crops, I assume you’re talking about biomass for combined heat and power (CHP) plants? CHP can run on a range of fuels – many of them from industrial and domestic waste. (On the size of CHP plants by the way, Immingham CHP in Humberside is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as Sizewell B). But I think you’re missing the point of the film – we wouldn’t be replacing like with like. Nuclear power belongs to the old, inefficient, unflexible, centralised energy model of large, remote power stations, where 2/3 of all energy is wasted. We’re calling for a decentralised energy system in with smaller plants located close to where electricity is used, so waste heat can be captured. You said: An air hostess receives more radiation than a nuclear power worker Accidents excepted, workers inside nuclear plants probably are well protected from radiation. But the people and ecosystems near plants clearly aren’t. Take Sellafield, which has routinely chucked radioactive liquids and gases into the Irish Sea since 1953. In the nearby area, childhood leukaemia incidence is up to 14 times higher than the rest of Britain. (Officially, the cause is unknown but radiation is the only known environmental cause of leukaemia.) The government's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee estimates that this and future generations can expect 200 cancer deaths worldwide for each year that Sellafield discharges nuclear waste into the sea and air. And the Irish Sea is now the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world - hence we have radioactive salmon and sea food). The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment is choc-full of reports on this subject. You said: Every new nuclear power station is strong enough to withhold a 9/11 type terrorist attack. The (pro-nuclear) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said: “Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time. If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact.'' There’s loads more in our nuclear power and terrorism briefing (pdf). In terms of the new reactors (EPRs, which are proposed for the UK), a confidential leaked document from Electricite de France (EdF, who build reactors) contradicts you too. After 9/11, EdF was asked to prove that its reactors could withstand aircraft attack. Apparently the only way they could do it was to base their calculations on a number of ridiculous assumptions: 1) that the impact of a 250 tonne commercial jet aircraft would be the same as the impact of a 2-5 tonne military aircraft 2) that terrorists would have insufficient skills to pilot an aircraft directly into a nuclear power station and 3) that up to 100 tonnes of aviation fuel from a commercial aircraft would burn up within two minutes. Lots more in this Assessment of the Operational Risks and Hazards of the EPR when Subject to Aircraft Attack. You said: Ninety per cent of the world's radiation is in the atmosphere - 9.9% comes from medical activities - 0.003% comes from nuclear power stations. Again, I don’t have time to check your figures but I assume you realise they’re beside the point? The problem isn’t with low level background radiation in the atmosphere; it’s with high concentrations of radioactive materials flooding into oceans, land, ecosystems, water tables, farms, food chain and populated areas (not to mention all the species we share the planet with). Just in terms of human health, you can find out more about the impacts of radiation in our report on the consequences on human health from the Chernobyl catastrophe. You said: There are 20 nuclear power stations on the French coast south of Calais. So if they were hit we would be snookered anyway! Therefore we should build more plants here so future generations keep facing the threat? You said: 30 new nuclear power stations in the UK would provide nearly all of our electricity. 30 new nuclear power stations in the UK would reduce our CO2 emissions by 40% Again, I’m not going to check your figures because the argument is academic. How would it be possible to build 30 reactors in the UK? Where would you site them? Our (pro-nuclear) government only wants to build 10 (to replace those that are reaching the end of their ability to operate safely). Even the nuclear industry isn’t proposing building 30 – they know there’s no way you could find 30 sites in the UK suited to building a nuclear power plant (even the ones we have are precariously at risk of flooding from climate change). And what would you do with the waste? We already have half a million tonnes that the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management doesn’t know what to do with. (Their chair admits: "clearly our recommendations do not solve the problem") And where would you find the hundreds of billions of pounds for them? You said: Total affordable UK renewable capacity (<7p/kWh) is only 10% of total energy demand. In terms of electricity supply, even the government’s own figures show that a mixture of tidal, wave and wind could provide more than double what nuclear can in the same time frame – and to do so would be economic and practicable (more than a quarter of today's electricity consumption from wind power by 2025, and 12.5 per cent from wave and tidal). In terms of energy, by which I assume you mean heat and electricity, nuclear power does almost nothing to contribute to our heating needs (the biggest use of fossil fuels in the UK). CHP on the other hand can do a huge amount by capturing waste heat at the source, as the name suggests. (That’s without mentioning the energy savings we can make through efficiency: every year we throw away more than eight times the amount of energy supplied by all of the UK's nuclear power stations combined.) You said: Every nuclear power station in the West has a specially designed concrete containment shield. These have never failed. Russian reactors never had this. Nobody has died in the Western nuclear power program, compared to tens of thousands in coal mines, gas pipeline explosions hydro accidents etc. New nuclear power stations can be built of a 'passively safe' modular design. You might want to look at the Windscale disaster here in the UK for starters: “Figures for non-fatal cancers vary from none to 248 and for fatal cancers between 10 and 100. One estimate [from epidemiologist John Urquhart, was the first to really assess the impact of the polonium-210 release from the fire] put the figure as high as 1,000.” Over the past few years, there have been reactor safety problems in the UK (here, here, here, here and here, say) Finland (over 1000 breaches of safety rules just 18 months into construction), Sweden and Japan – just for starters. In fact, there’s been a nuclear accident or radioactive release for every day of the year (pdf). And you haven’t mentioned the potential for accident from the transport of waste across the UK on often unguarded nuclear waste trains, or the shipments of weapons grade plutonium around the world, or the leakages from nuclear waste (here and here, say). And I don’t know if you caught this story a couple of weeks ago but a mafia clan in Italy is accused of trafficking illegal waste… Lots more info in our report: Risks of transporting irradiated fuel and nuclear materials in the UK. You said: So off this are we happy that nuclear power would actually help our country? Ummm... no. Sorry :) You said: I fail to see why it is any business of a bunch of BoBo hippies at the greenpeace office how their coffee grinders and bagel toasters get powered. I fail to see why it’s any business of a few people after short-term profit to degrade or destroy the world’s oceans, forests and atmosphere (ie “the global commons”) and many of the species dependent on them through climate change and radioactive contamination. But hey, I’m just a BoBo hippy ;) Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 2 November 2007 at 12:44pm

Firstly, I absolutely agree that energy solutions should be appropriate to the task they're fulfilling, and that we need diversity of sources. Certain industries have spent a good deal of effort putting about the myth that CHP / renewables aren't base-load, and can't be reliable. In fact, I'd argue that renewables and CHP (and efficiency) are more reliable than nukes / coal, because they're scalable to demand and application, and they fit perfectly into a flexible, decentralised model. Diversity still requires choices, and experience shows that you can't mix nuclear and renewables/CHP effectively: nuclear sucks investment away from renewables/CHP; it relies on a static, centralised model and as opposed to a decentralised model; and, as this report (pdf) points out, "nuclear and renewables may both be able to run on the grid as long as both are making relatively small overall contributions, but both cannot expand beyond a certain point without there being operational conflicts." CHP can be base-load. It can be scaled up to huge sizes (Immingham CHP plant is about to be expanded to reach the same electricity generating capacity as Sizewell B). Yes, output depends on heat demand, but industrial CHP plants like Immingham are basically base-load plants; there's a constant demand for heat/steam so there's a constant electrical output to act as base-load supply. For smaller CHP plants, output depends on heat demand, but if it's properly sited (eg near a commercial/industrial site that requires heat/cooling), CHP can have a consistent, constant electrical output that can be pumped into the grid. To answer the example you mention, a city like London has a high enough heat and build density to make CHP financially, as well as environmentally, attractive. Renewables can also be base-load; solar thermal and geothermal for example, have identical variability to coal-fired power stations. Linked wind farms can also result in reliable power (source). There's interesting stuff on the base-load fallacy here (pdf), bits of which I've pilfered for this comment :-) There's also this interesting article on how Germany can be powered - reliably - using distributed power based on 100% renewables, and biogas CHP. And this (older) article looks in-depth at renewables and the baseload question. Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 4 January 2008 at 7:27pm

Hey Chris Re-reading our Southampton case study, I realise I didn't phrase it too well - I've now amended it to make it clear that the £7 million figure you quote is for the whole Southampton district heating network, not just the hospital. (The network provides heating, cooling and electricity to over a thousand residential properties, several large office buildings, a health clinic, a university, a large shopping centre, a supermarket, several hotels, BBC television studios, one of Europe's largest shopping complexes, a swimming and diving complex, as well as the hospital, among other buildings). I'll try to dig up some figures on costs of decentralised energy for London but, in the meantime, you might be interested in our report, Powering London into the 21st Century (pdf), on decentralised energy in London. Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 8 January 2008 at 12:57pm

Just to let folks know we've launched a virtual town powered by decentralised energy at www.greenpeace.org.uk/efficiencity. There are all sorts of goodies (animations, videos, slideshows explaining everything from wave power to biogas) if you click around and drill down far enough. It's also shows how the whole decentralised energy system fits together (eg the role of CHP and how heat and cooling are distributed, for example) a lot more clearly and intuitively than my writing, hopefully. (Getting EfficienCity ready for launch is also my excuse for not having answered the last few comments yet - sorry. Soon.). Anyway, here's the link again. Cheers, Bex gpuk PS For those who prefer words, there's also a description of what decentralsied energy is at www.greenpeace.org.uk/efficiencity/about

By bex - 7 February 2008 at 7:24pm

Hi ColinG Sorry for the length of this but I'm trying to respond to all your comments across the site in one go, as they all repeat the same myths. I’ll answer your points on air pollution below but first off, I have to point out that you haven’t provided a credible alternative to our energy solution. We’ve clearly explained how renewables + efficiency + CHP can lead us to a low emissions energy system, using CHP as a transition to 100 per cent renewables, providing heat and electricity for the whole of the UK. Initially CHP would be partly fossil fuelled and it would then go on to use zero carbon fuels like biogas. Over time more, renewable heat like solar and geothermal can also be introduced into the district heating networks – as they have done in the 100% renewable district in the city of Malmö, Sweden. As I’ve said before, a replacement programme of ten nuclear reactors in the UK that the government's endorsed will only meet about 3.6% of our total energy needs - because they won’t provide heat. Around half our energy need is for heat (mainly gas based), while the next biggest demand is for transport (mainly oil based). Electricity generation is the smallest portion, and any new nuclear would be a small portion of that, making its role in tackling climate change / ensuring energy security almost irrelevant. That's why the nuclear plan causes much more air pollution overall, for the total system; it can't possibly displace the majority of fossil fuel use, and leaves us running on the same kind of wasteful and polluting coal plants we have today. (Don't forget, the same ministers and companies that want to build new nuclear plants are also proposing the horde of new dirty coal plants across Britain – the most polluting power plants of all.) According to our report, a UK energy scenario with high levels of decentralised energy using CHP and big renewables leads to less fuel burn over all than the government and industry plan of a centralized scenario with ambitious nuclear build. Less fuel use means less overall air pollution. Your answer to that is that you want nuclear combined heat and power. No one in the nuclear industry or government is proposing that anyway – they wouldn’t dare propose to put them near to densely populated areas. But even if they did, you still haven’t explained how you’ll get rid of fossil fuels. Are you suggesting we’ll be able to displace all our fossil fuelled power plants and all our individual boilers with nuclear CHP? Do you have an estimate for how many nuclear plants you’d need to do that? (In China, with the most ambitious nuclear programme in the world, they will still only generate a couple of percent of their electricity from nuclear when and if they built all 30-40 reactors that have been mooted there. Most of the rest of their electricity will still be coming from coal.) How can the UK possibly get enough nuclear power to displace all our fossil fuel needs? Specifically, how are you going to find the enormous funds required to build small nuclear power stations near every town and city (the smaller ones you suggest, which won’t benefit from the economies of scale)? Where will you find the sites fit to host N nuclear plants? How will you persuade local residents across the UK to accept nuclear power and/or nuclear waste sites in the outskirts of their towns and cities? If you don’t want the nuclear plants to be close to urban centres, how will you fund the phenomenal costs of piping heat from, say, Sizewell to London? How will you find the nuclear engineers to build all the plants (there’s already a huge skills shortage)? How will you persuade the government that the building of your nuclear plants won’t run massively over time and over budget like every other nuclear construction project (the average nuclear power station is finished four years late and 300 per cent over budget)? How will you transport all the radioactive wastes between the sites without putting the public at an unacceptable risk? How will you protect every plant and transport route from contamination / accident / terrorist attack? How do you propose to make nuclear power a globally applicable solution (at the moment, some countries, like Iran, are being told they aren’t allowed to have it)? For nuclear power to realistically meet our future global electricity demands, 2000 - 2500 reactors will need to be constructed between now and 2075 - an impossible task. How will you guarantee the weapons grade plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands? How do you plan to get rid of the significant fossil fuel use in the nuclear lifecycle (mining, transport, energy use around facilities, waste storage)? And, if you agree that nuclear CHP will never fill the gap alone and you want renewables in the mix, how do you envisage stopping nuclear from undermining renewables as global experience and technical grid limitations both show it does (nuclear and renewables may both be able to run on the grid as long as both are making relatively small overall contributions, but both can't expand beyond a certain point without there being operational conflicts)? The nuclear industry itself says there is a conflict between nuclear and renewables and has lobbied to get the European renewable energy target weakened. Vincent De Rivaz, the CEO of EDF Energy stated at the Adam Smith Institute in March that if the UK actually started to make significant progress in meeting its Renewables Obligations, the economic viability of the new generation of nuclear power plants would be undermined and nuclear would be marginalised. The case for decentralised energy based on renewables, CHP and efficiency has already been made and proven – in countless reports and in other countries. Why would you want to use an outdated technology that is more expensive and more dangerous? I’m guessing you’re going to say because of particulates/air pollution (and you are right that air pollution is a big concern and a killer, especially in places like China). But, for all the reasons above, nuclear allows continued and even increased air pollution because of its undermining effect on energy efficiency measures – the nuclear option is more likely to lead to more air pollution than a system of decentralised energy based on gas / biomass / biogas CHP. And going nuclear can’t lead us to a 100% renewables scenario. Decentralised energy can. All the new nuclear in China is barely going to touch the air pollution problems there. On your comments about CHP and particulates, larger CHP falls under IPPC requirements, and these control emissions to air. (And, as from the start of this year, some large CHP plants are covered by Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), specifically targetting NOx SOx and particulates.) Before a CHP plant can be built, modified or continue to be operated, emissions to air are mapped, taking into account all existing sources of emission (not just those of the new/existing plant – let’s not forget that cars and lorries are a major source of air pollution too) to ensure local air quality standards are met. If the model shows that the emissions "on the ground" get near to breaching the local air quality standards then the plant will not be built or, if it exists, allowed to continue to operate unless its output is restricted/other measures put in place. Then there’s the fact that a decent sized gas-fired CHP plant will displace many hundreds or thousands of individual gas-fired boilers. Therefore, it can actually improve local air quality, because: - a large heat plant will be sized more closely to actual heat loads than individual boilers, which are typically oversized to meet peak demand load. (A district heat plant overcomes this problem by having in-line boilers that are switched on or off progressively as demand for heat fluctuates throughout the day or the year.) - a large CHP plant will burn gas more efficiently than the combination of all those numerous small boilers and the power plants providing the equivalent heat and electricity. - it’s cost effective and quick to add emissions cleaning equipment to large plant, or to switch it to cleaner fuels as they become available, but not with many small ones like boilers. - the maintenance of large plants will be more effectively managed than individual boilers, impacting on the efficiency and cleanness of gas burn. I hope that answers all of your points. And sorry for the delay. As you can imagine, we don’t have the resources to post dozens of comments on the same point – unlike some well funded industries… ;-) Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 15 May 2008 at 12:05pm

Hi again ColinG Just realised I haven't responded directly on nuclear waste and your assertion that there's no valid environmental case for avoiding nuclear power. Not only do reactor operations present their own hazards and exposure pathways - like neutron shine and radioactive discharges in the biosphere - there are other risks which contribute to the overall environmental impact of nuclear power and nuclear activities. Waste is created at every stage of the process - from mining, uranium conversion and enrichment, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, storage and disposal. And there's still no safe solution to disposing of the estimated half a million tones of legacy radioactive waste created in the UK. Despite government and industry claims, there is no solution to this intractable problem – with no operating waste disposal site anywhere in the world – and there's huge uncertainty over the scientific and technical integrity of the agreed option such as geological disposal. Whilst deep disposal is based on a multi-barrier approach, it is recognised by NIREX that, in time, the integrity of these barriers will be compromised and radioactive contamination will inevitably return to the surface environment. In other words, it's clear that 'disposing' of radioactive waste in a deep 'repository' accepts by default the outdated premise of eventual dispersal and dilution into the environment - rather like dumping industrial waste into a river - posing a persistent, irreversible threat to future generations. And despite nuclear industry claims that these new reactors would "only" increase the UK's current waste volume by 10%, what they don't say is that this will include a 300% increase of the most long-lived and highly radioactive waste. Without a solution to dealing with legacy waste, to build more reactors and add the stockpile raises huge environmental, social, and ethical questions which makes such a proposal unacceptable. Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 15 May 2008 at 12:16pm

Hi Colin, A lot of experts would disagree with you that "The technical solution to the safe disposal of nuclear waste has been known for a long time" - including some from CoRWM (the body tasked by the government with finding a solution to dealing with the UK's existing radioactive waste, whose report you link to). Pete Wilkinson, member the first Committee on Radioactive Waste Management: "There is no 'solution' to the management of radioactive waste, be it 'legacy waste' or that derived from the operation of a new generation of nuclear power plants. That Government has assumed the recommendation from the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management represents such a 'solution' is wrong and deliberately mendacious." Prof Andy Blowers, also a member of CoRWM: "The unresolved technical and ethical concerns related to managing radioactive wastes safely provide both a necessary and sufficient condition for rejecting the case for nuclear new build." and "Nuclear new build should not proceed until there is an acceptable solution for the permanent management of long-lived solid nuclear waste." Re your assertions about safety, Dr Paul Dorfman, University of Warwick, former co-Secretary to the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters (CERRIE) says: "There are real concerns that infants and children living near nuclear facilities may be subject to greater cancer and leukaemia risk." and "Since current radiation risk standards are subject to large levels of fundamental scientific uncertainty, and may underestimate risk to public health, it would be unwise to subject critical groups and the general public to further radiological insult through new nuclear build in the UK." See www.nuclearconsult.com for more. Cheers, Bex gpuk

By bex - 20 May 2008 at 2:51pm

Here, have a poll to cheer yourself up: I just stumbled across the Ipsos Mori 2008 poll on climate change today and the findings are interesting - it looks like attitudes are changing faster than it sometimes seems (to me). 77 per cent of people are very or fairly concerned about climate change, 68 per cent want the government to do more, and 59 per cent want the UK to invest in renewables, even if it costs more. When it comes to individual action, 86 per cent say we should be taking personal action (4 per cent don't know). But, interestingly, 77 per cent agree with the statement 'People are concerned but at the end of the day they're not prepared to make big sacrifices for the environment'. So to me, the poll suggests almost everybody thinks they should be taking personal action (to some degree or another), but assumes nobody else will do the same. Of course there's still the question of how substantial that personal action is but, once that first mental leap has been taken... Optimistically, Bex gpuk